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COUNTDOWN IS BACK THIS JANUARY, 2019 ...  ON rage !!!!!
Stay tuned below with regular Countdown full archival information for each Countdown episode rage shall be airing every Saturday throughout January ...

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Re: ABC HD & ABC standard


this got interestingly off topic lol. So getting back to HD, as i said in my first post, i don't really see the point in recording Countdown episodes on the HD channel since it only results in larger file sizes. And also the source material is far from HD, so it would be upscaled at best. I didn't notice any difference doing switching back & forth from ABC to ABC HD to compare, did anyone else?

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

Bernie

this got interestingly off topic lol. So getting back to HD, as i said in my first post, i don't really see the point in recording Countdown episodes on the HD channel since it only results in larger file sizes. And also the source material is far from HD, so it would be upscaled at best. I didn't notice any difference doing switching back & forth from ABC to ABC HD to compare, did anyone else?
At Bernie,

If you are a person who records new material which I have no interest in and you are extra fussy and get right close up to the screen, HD will look slightly clearer on a Joanna Lumley special for instance which I just saw a few minutes of minutes ago on ABC.

I recorded it in SD as a test for 'NEW MATERIAL' again ... not that I collect NEW MATERIAL as I have no interest in it and it looks a little clearer on the actual Channel on ABC HD than the recorded version, but very slightly ... again .... if you put your head right on the screen but not when you sit back. It would slightly Upscale it at best with very little difference for Retro material and if that is only what you record and keep then the comparison from SD to HD is virtually nothing from rage.

But again, because I only collect Music Videos from rage from the 70s and 80s on their VAULT Specials and of course COUNTDOWN and ROCK ARENA in January, I see absolutely no difference in picture.

And of course, for me, I record in 4.3 Pan and Scan as I don't appreciate having bars on my 70s and 80s videos and surely don't appreciate it on Countdown and Rock Arena. How people collect Countdown's with bars on each side with a logo is beyond me, it is utterly vile. Don't start me on those that record rage and Countdown with a huge black box around a miniature small square picture. Even if I wanted to record in HD for Countdown, Rock Arena and 70s and 80s videos on 'rage' VAULT Specials, recording in HD doesn't allow you to have 4.3 full picture, it forces one to have bars so the point of any slight upscale would be ruined for me by bars on the actual final recording.

Also, one's TV Settings also plays a HUGE part in Picture for Countdown Episodes and 70s and 80s Music Videos. Many people don't even go to their TV Settings and work out what looks best. On my Panasonic TV, Cinema Mode and me carefully calculating what each setting should be on with Contrast, Brightness etc plays a huge part on how a picture can look for items like Countdown, Rock Arena and rage videos from the 70s and 80s.


Like Nathan, if I am forced to record something in 16.9 because rage play an 80s video and stretch it, I can barely bare the abc logo being there and seeing HD next to it makes it even more worse, that is more graffiti. But luckily, usually in a VAULT special on rage, there are usually only two or three videos that are stretched and they are usually common videos like Vienna from Ultravox, which I already have on Ultravox and Midge Ure DVDs anyway.

Yes, this topic started getting onto Vinyl which has nothing to do with the original topic.

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

In terms of workflows I abandoned analogue as soon as I could. I don’t go for this fuzzy-wuzzy nonsense that analogue is better/warmer/more emotional etc. I hate ghosting, I hate tape dropouts, I hate the crappy resolution of VHS tapes and all their imperfections.

I bought my first digital TV set-top box in 2003 (HD capable too) and it cost me a fortune. That got rid of the crappy analogue TV reception part, but I still had to rely on an analogue VCR to record it. I dumped that in 2006 when digital TV tuner cards that record the raw digital TV stream direct to computer hard disk became affordable. No intervening DVD or other transcoding - the pure raw digital signal - 100% bit-for-bit copy of what was broadcast with zero degradation.

I have never looked back. I don’t miss analogue one tiny bit. I back up my hard drives every week with two redundant copies.

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

Half the digital channels in the UK are now on a par with low res YouTube.
The HD channels are at least decent quality, but I don't call this situation progress.
On a limited bandwidth quantity over quality now seems to be the name of the game.
But when I compare my recordings of TOTP from BBC Four SD and HD, the HD ones look significantly better than the SD ones, even though the source footage itself is of course SD.

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

Just to add, I thought both SD & HD broadcasts were interlaced in OZ, is that not the case?

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

Matty
Just to add, I thought both SD & HD broadcasts were interlaced in OZ, is that not the case?
ABC HD is certainly interlaced in Perth. I'd be highly surprised if it was different in other cities.

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

That's what I thought, but in an earlier post Clip Magnet says this:

"The HD channel (MPEG-4) is broadcast as progressive video not interlaced, whereas the SD channel (MPEG-2) is broadcast interlaced. So if the original material is interlaced (most old video material is) then the HD channel de-interlaces it before broadcast. This can result in what looks like blurrier motion and fuzzier stills, and actually removes some of the original motion information in the original material. I don’t like the resultant effect."

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

Just curious,

Those of you recording ABC HD, have Rage in particular introduced any subcoding into their broadcast? I record retro in one block, then edit later, but I’m finding and only recently that when I skip ahead, every one of these happens at the end of every video clip or similar. Say hitscene is 26 minutes, and there’s a clip before it and after it, i can cue to the end of the clip, then the end of hitscene and so on. Didn’t seem to happen until only recently so I’m wondering if the ABC transmission is now also transmitting the end markers of items from their automation system.

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

SD Vs HD, depends on your perspective and what you're doing with the video. SD is fine if you are making DVDs, because the SD stream is MPEG, there will be little, if any re-encoding if you are going from PVR (like a Topfield recorder) to PC to DVD. However, ABC has greatly reduced the SD bitrate over the years, I have digital recordings in SD from ten years ago that look great but these days, they just look :hankey:, as more people have HD sets, the quality of the SD feed has deteriorated.

Original broadcasts of Countdown might not have originally shot in HD, but ABCHD is broadcast in MPEG4, a newer format. It should look better, you may even find part of the transferring process at the ABC is upscaling the content digitally before it's aired on Rage.

Another argument supporting HD is if you are uploading to YouTube, YouTube gives a higher bitrate allowance to HD videos, so again, they should look much better on YouTube than uploading an SD quality MPEG2 video.

One area where SD wins against HD is DVD creation. If you are making a DVD from the HD video, you're going from about a 50 frames per second to 25 fps, so when you look at movement in your end product, it will look fuzzy, not to mention with a HD video you're scaling down the video. So SD wins if you're making DVDs.

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

ABC SD & HD are both 50i so it makes no difference to that aspect of DVD creation

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

If that's true, then you're going to lose quality creating DVDs from SD broadcasts, I haven't recorded SD for a long time, I just looked at an SD recording from 2014 and that was 25f/s.

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

50i is 25 full frames/sec, interlaced.
It's what analogue tv was, and it's what a lot of digital tv still is.

Re: ABC HD & ABC standard

Rhys
SD Vs HD, depends on your perspective and what you're doing with the video. SD is fine if you are making DVDs, because the SD stream is MPEG, there will be little, if any re-encoding if you are going from PVR (like a Topfield recorder) to PC to DVD. However, ABC has greatly reduced the SD bitrate over the years, I have digital recordings in SD from ten years ago that look great but these days, they just look :hankey:, as more people have HD sets, the quality of the SD feed has deteriorated.

Original broadcasts of Countdown might not have originally shot in HD, but ABCHD is broadcast in MPEG4, a newer format. It should look better, you may even find part of the transferring process at the ABC is upscaling the content digitally before it's aired on Rage.

Another argument supporting HD is if you are uploading to YouTube, YouTube gives a higher bitrate allowance to HD videos, so again, they should look much better on YouTube than uploading an SD quality MPEG2 video.

One area where SD wins against HD is DVD creation. If you are making a DVD from the HD video, you're going from about a 50 frames per second to 25 fps, so when you look at movement in your end product, it will look fuzzy, not to mention with a HD video you're scaling down the video. So SD wins if you're making DVDs.
Apologies for mis-speaking. The HD channel is indeed broadcast interlaced. My bad.

But I have noticed that when rage gets 'new' old clips out of the ABC Archive and adds them to its own library, when they digitise them they are increasingly de-interlacing it in that process. Have a look at the Rock Arena repeat from a couple of weeks ago - it is all de-interlaced to be progressive, not left as interlaced as it was originally :hankey:

ABC has not reduced the SD bitrate. That is a false claim.

I looked at the MPEG stream data for some SD channel clips I recorded in 2006. They were peaking around 5.7-6.3 Mbps. I looked at SD channel clips recorded in the last few weeks, they were peaking around 5.9-6.6 Mbps. And I record the raw MPEG stream directly to hard disk. I do not use a DVD recorder, so no transcoding, no converting. These are the true, raw bitrates as broadcast.

Note the bitrate varies depending on the content. Fast moving content needs a higher bitrate. Very slow moving content might be as low as 2 Mbps.

The HD bitrate is much lower, around 3.5-4 Mbps, because H.264 is a much more efficient codec than MPEG-2, even though there are more pixels to encode.